Advances in multimedia technology over recent years have continuously served to enhance and provide a more immersive viewing experience for users. Today's televisions have larger screens, high-definition screen resolutions, and 3D capabilities. In addition, handheld devices now regularly have high resolution screens with vibrant colors and access to numerous sources of content through the Internet. Similarly, advancements in audio technologies such as improved surround sound systems, higher fidelity home theater speakers, and high definition audio further enhance users' multimedia viewing experience. In addition to advancements in video and audio technologies, haptic effects are used to further immerse users in the viewing experience through the viewers' sense of touch. Haptically-enabled video game console controllers that provide haptic effects corresponding to events in a video game are pervasive examples of the use of haptics to enhance user experience. Similarly, most handheld mobile devices (e.g., cell phones, tablet computers) today contain hardware that permits applications to provide haptic effects.
Employing haptics to enhance the playback of audio and/or video content is also well known. In some cases, haptic designers compile haptic tracks—a specific set of haptic effects to be output at particular times during the playback of the multimedia content—that are used by systems or devices playing the multimedia file to provide haptic effects. While an advantage of this method is that it yields haptic tracks specifically tailored to the multimedia content, it requires employing a haptic designer to manually design haptic tracks for each multimedia content item. Alternatives to manual design include automated processes that use algorithms to analyze the audio and/or video content to determine haptic effects to be output. Examples of such techniques include Acoustic Event Detection (“AED”), described in above-referenced U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/078,445, Blind Source Separation (“BSS”), also described in above-referenced U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/078,445, and image pattern matching. However, these known automated haptification algorithms suffer from inaccuracy and heavy processing requirements. In addition, the automated haptification algorithms also have a tendency to be over-inclusive—haptifying events that are not desirable and often result in an overly noisy haptic track (e.g., typing on a keyboard, shouting, music)—and under-inclusive—failing to haptify key events in the multimedia content.